The ideas denoted by the Greek words kenosis and eschaton as used in the scriptures have been given a great deal of consideration, and often cacological treatment, in contemporary theology. Kenosis is used by Paul to describe the incarnation. It references God’s self-abnegation, the divine “emptying” of self into the world in Christ. Eschaton has a history in prophetic literature. It references the “last age”, the end of time, or the dawn of the definitive time. I offer the following reflections neither to correct nor clarify the investigations of others, merely, this being spring, to enfleurage.
God, as Paul expresses it, empties himself into Christ. In this statement Paul seems to wish to convey the absoluteness, the definitiveness of the presence of the divine in this Jesus called the Christ. Christ, however, is not a closed historical event, not a singularity in the flow of humanity cut off from all others. Christ is in the beginning when all things are made. Christ is the very pulse of time constitutive of history.
The incarnation does not, therefore, begin in Mary’s womb. It is integral with and in creation. It is the perfecting of creation set in motion from the beginning, God’s pre-destination of his sovereign work. It is initiated in the eternality of God and becomes for us ideogrammatically, logogrammatically, manifest to us in the fullness of time in Jesus. It continues to be manifest for us and to us through the Spirit of Christ, who is also the Spirit of God, in the unfolding of the Eschaton in all who by faith embrace the work of Christ, who “put on Christ” as their modus operandi before God in and for the sake of the world.
The inexhaustible divine endlessly immanent-izes itself in its creative dynamic (biblically said: God endlessly incarnates into the world through his Holy Spirit, the Spirit at once of God and of Christ). This divine kenosis reaches even into the absoluteness of man’s finitude, death. God dies in the sacred and broken heart of the crucified Christ. God dies there as the Deus absconditus, the “hidden God”, the God hidden in incomprehensibility, in doubt, in the sin, solitude, and alienation of man before the Law of God, the wrath of God.
Resurrection, like incarnation, is not a once and for all time historical event. It is a dynamic, the ever-rising that dissolves the bounds between sacred and secular, manifesting itself on multiple planes. Jesus becomes “the first born from among the dead”. The dead referenced here is not primarily the manifold of humanity that pre-deceased Jesus, but the very “hidden God” now unveiled the Deus revelatus, the “revealed God”, the God manifest as life in the Spirit of God, in the salubriousness of God, the Saviour, the life-bearer. This constitutes a dramatic, climactic polar shift in the direction of creation. In this rising the dynamic of creation moves ahead of creation and summons it forward to its eshaton, its fullness, its true life. Up to the death of Jesus creation had been propelled forward by the Word of God. Now it is summoned from before itself by the Spirit of God. The emptying of the divine reaches its climacteric moment in resurrection and the polarity of creation’s movement is radically re-oriented from God, now to God.
This is not about a reversal of a spiritual electromagnetic field. It is about a revelation to the spirit of man, summoning with transformative force man out of obedience to responsibility. It is about decreeing alienation twixt God and man dead, and concretizing the relationship of God with man in this world. This is not a negation of the inexhaustible transcendent God. God is always God, man is always man, but sin, guilt, anxiety, fear and their compotators at the soul of man are exposed as episodes of a catabolic primordial psychosis redeemable, curable in a re-al-location of God from the externality of man to God as the centrality of man, in man becoming heart and mind, body and soul one with God in action, in life, in man being truly, authentically, graciously able to pronounce within himself in this world the divine name “I Am”. Such is the Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ unsealed from the tomb and sealed in the Spirit of God as the “life-giving Spirit for the sake of all”, the new dynamic into which all are summoned.
God alone can say “I Am”. Therefore, Resurrection is pure grace, God’s freely given presence, cauterizing every wound and restoring the broken to life. Jesus does not of himself rise; Paul says, “God has raised him up”. The action of the Christ is always one of assent to the presence of God, the will of God within. Thus, it is the Risen Christ around whom orbit the dysmetria of monothelitism, monophysitism, docetism, and their corrections in the considerations of Nicaea and Chalcedon. To the world which proclaims the experience of meaninglessness, of anxiety and despair, which gads everywhere and goes nowhere, Resurrection is cant and buncombe. Yet the plenum of saints is filled by men and women transfigured by Resurrection, who have in large and small transformed the world about them for the better, and of their efforts, with Paul, humbly confess “it is not I, but Christ who lives within me”. Christ, God’s agent to the world, is raised up in to God, and God immerses himself into the world. The Absolute Holy, the “Holy Holy Holy”, stands no longer on a mount in Sinai, no longer behind a temple veil, but within the very core of man.
Thus, eschaton, the idea of an end time, or a time after time, or the definitive new age cannot be understood as something trans-temporal or post-temporal once the eternal, the timeless God becomes manifest as the incarnate and dynamic presence within creation. Eschaton must, therefore, be viewed existentially—as the meaning-fullness of time. It is not a vision of the end of time but of the consummate comprehension of time: the continual outpouring of God into creation as its very life, as the incarnate in its present, as the risen into its future, God-being-in, God-being-with, God-being-for, God-being-before, God summoning the worship and love, the centring of creation upon himself in, by, with and through his presence without end. Eschaton is not about a time that will be, it is about what time, our time, can be, it is about what liberated from self-centredness man can make of this creation.
Death, sin, alienation from God cannot halt God’s creative act because God in his sovereignty has in Christ predestined it, has declared from the foundations of the world that his work is undefeatable. God cannot be stopped, that is the root meaning of Resurrection. God has raised up this Jesus in whom he has manifested his work, his power, his will to unbounded life, as the one whose life is now “hidden”, enfolded in the very Spirit of God, thus now also the Spirit of Christ, actively, dynamically lifting, soliciting the world to the truth and full power of its existence.
It is the presence of the transcending power as the dynamis of resurrection in which the risen Jesus is, says Paul, hidden. Thus, the disciple always encounters him in an ambiguous manner. The disciple does not recognize him as the accustomed Jesus; there is a difference, and he must be discerned, as Spirit always in this world must. The Jesus the disciple encounters is a halation, a light spilling out of its bounds, a bound out of synchronization with the world, a chronos, a time, (in biblical terms, a kairos, a definitive time) that draws “now” toward its fulfilment. To the disciple the encounter with the Risen One is always something hyaline as compared to the memory of him because the Risen One always appears from the “yet to be” of the disciple’s world. Look at the imagery used in scripture: he is there before the disciples, he goes before, he is suddenly in the midst and suddenly he is taken from view, he comes in the spirit like fire, like wind, like a strike of lightening. There is always a sense of movement, of urgency, of power of insight. The Renaissance was fond of portraying the apparition of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalene. She moves to embrace him and is told “do not grasp me” (in Latin: Noli me tangere, and countless paintings carry this as title). Magdalene is told not to grasp because she cannot. Light, spirit, power cannot be held, the disciple can merely follow, merely be the one who is sent to “the others”.
What is the practical implication of this? Look again to the imagery used: God pitches his tent among us, God is his own altar in the midst of man, God is with us, he makes us his priests, his prophets, his sovereign representatives. What then is the role of church as an organization, as community, of liturgies, of dogmatics? Certainly church must be the locus to disseminate, to cultivate, to celebrate these images, but the how, the modes in which such tasks are affected are dependent upon their usefulness. Certainly processes can possess no inherent sacredness or immutability. Church itself–as institution–is simply an organization of disciples. The mission is to the world for the world, and it must, true to the creative Spirit, encounter and engage the world as it is. The mission must be informed by both the world and the Spirit, unless it would deny God incarnate, God be-fore us. The Spirit that guides the church in all things, the Spirit of Christ who is, in Paul’s words “the same yesterday, today and tomorrow”, relates itself to the world which is never the same, the world in which no person, no thing is immune to change, in which no person, no thing endures forever. Consider that the first disciples moved to a system of community property to exemplify the unity of all in the embrace of God. It did not last. Some religious groups have, from time to time, revisited this system, usually to some degree of approval from others. Yet, when some political groups (some Christian, some anti-christian) have attempted to employ such socialist vision, many who claim strictest adherence to holy writ have confidently and unabashedly condemned the efforts as demonic! Too many who subscribe to the immutability of religion have grasp of neither religion nor history. Too many who demand faith, fail to understand that faith, like its counterparts hope and love, is aroused not commanded. We cannot exalt any system of worship, of scholarship, of social action as the one and only way either for this time or for all times. The world, our understanding of the world, and our understanding of ourselves change. We must be as cognizant and responsive to those facts as to the Spirit through whom all is continuously made and summoned to its fullness. The role of church, in its every aspect, is relative—to Christ, and to the world. Church must relate to both realistically, practically, authentically—for Christ’s sake, for in Christ God himself is forevermore immersed in this our world and its unfolding. Such is the essence of kenosis and eschaton.
I must to the above add a caveat. Scripture is the portal before which man kneels to wait upon, to listen humbly for the voice of God. If it is taken as a text merely to read and analyse, then it is no more than an investigation in cultural anthropology. All that I have noted above is about a spiritual vision, and I readily acknowledge such vision has the power of affecting the volitional systems of both individuals and societies, of translating into action and therein material reality. In such transformative power of faith evidenced in others the world has been both blessed and bombed. In the attempts by some disposed to rationalizing every experience, churches, academies and governments have all made such vision into systems not paying due attention to the fact that in their efforts to do so they have filtered vision through a complex network of societal, cultural, and individual histories replete with all the attendant baggage. Spiritual vision is power, but it is rarely well contained in the vessel of reason. I must, therefore, emphasize the vision given above is not about the physics of this world, not about a meta-physics. It is not the groundwork for theories about the evolution of the universe or man, for such would be no more than biblical literalism revisited. Neither is it a foundation on which to build a tower of theological speculations, for such would be no more than Babel’s efforts revived. It is simply the fruit of worshipful meditation, set before the majesty of God, shared, and hopefully informative of a heart. This was Paul’s vision, I simply knelt here to pray, and so in Paul’s words I close heralding in this springtime and evermore my “thanks to God who in Christ makes us partners of his triumph, and through us spreads out the knowledge of himself like a sweet perfume” (2 Cor. 2:14).